The House of Mirrors maze created by Creative Studios' Christian Wagstaff and Keith Courtney is an out-of-body experience that’ll leave your eyes popping out of your head at Brisbane's Wonderland Festival.
The task of creating a mirror maze is massive; not only due to the size, but due to the amount of magnificent mazes there are.
Christian explains their desire to go back-to-basics in order to create something truly inspiring: “The thing with mazes, is that everyone has some sort of relationship with them whether they have seen one, been to one or heard of one. With ours, we took influence from a 1900s one and scaled it up to such a grand size. We wanted to go back-to-basics with glass that had no tricks, no lights or sounds; we wanted it to be a true optical illusion,” he says. “This maze is like one you’d find at an amusement fair as it mixes feelings of excitement with fear. Those are two emotions that are quite conflicting but they make the experience.”
“We knew our take on the maze would work after we did a trial. We finished one section and straight away we could tell it would work. We completed the whole thing in 12 weeks which is quite rushed but once we had it set up in Hobart both the crowd and us were just blown away.” Along with the astonishing geometry, the thing that really puts this maze apart from others is something Christian explains with great enthusiasm. “The scale! It’s very large; we wanted to make sure people got lost in space. The high mirrors and angles make people, at some points, just walk around in circles without realising. It’s quite funny to hear people say ‘I’m sure we have been here before’ as they start to figure it out.”
Their maze will be a part of the Brisbane Wonderland Festival, a festival that suits this maze almost perfectly. Christian expresses his excitement about being part of the festival. “It’s a fantastic festival; we are very excited to have our maze there! We pitched our idea and they were really excited about it which was great. Also the venue is aesthetically beautiful, the exteriors are old, ominous which only adds to our maze. It’s a great festival to be a part of.”
After the Brisbane festival, the boys will tour their extraordinary maze, something Christian is greatly looking forward to. “The most exciting part of touring the maze is that a lot of people will get to experience it. Really we were on cloud nine watching people reacting while they tried to figure it out. In Hobart we went in to watch people without them knowing we were the creators. We saw these delightful reactions of joy and frustration as people got lost. Kids seem to master it quicker than the parents. Dads will often have a cocky smile as if to say ‘Yeah this will be easy’ but the kids don’t have any clutter or ideas of direction in their head and figure it out quicker which is always fun to watch.”
